From: "old hoodoo"


JMO:

The only issue about the Nagasaki and Hiroshima is if it is justifiable in
war to one child in the hopes that more children will be saved overall
and/or if a single soldier is more valuable than a single child. A basic
morality question.

snip more of the same.

Let's look at the options: blockade, atomic bombing, invasion and conventional
bombing.

Blockade: children were already starving to death with Japan showing no sign of
surrender. The number of children who would have died could easily exceed one
million.

Conventional bombing: children were already dying. The number of children who
would have died could easily exceed a few hundred thousand from direct
bombardment and starvation.

Invasion: children would have died in the tactical bombing, murder/suicide by
parents, children were already being trained to fight and some would have died
in "combat" etc. The number of children who would have died could easily exceed
half a million.

Nuclear bombing: children died. Exact numbers of children killed is unknown.
Assuming one third of the dead were children the number would be on the order
of 60,000.

In all of the above cases the war would still be going on in China, Korea etc
and children were dying there too.

In war people die. Unfortunately children do too.


US casualties would have been no where near 100,000 , but we still would
have lost people of course.

Most scholars use the number 100,000. On another thread someone said the U.S.
had ordered one million coffins. Looking at it with what was known in 1945 no
one had any accurate idea of casualties. They could only go by the actions on
Okinawa etc.

You are comparing apples to oranges in your argument: number of dead children
versus dead U.S. servicemen. It wasn't just that simple. There waas a major
land war going on in Asia that would not end until Japan had been driven out,
had won or had surrendered.

However, the result would possibly have been far more morally easy to justify.

War itself is immoral. Would it have been any less moral if the bombs had not
been dropped and Japan suffered millions of casualties from suicide,
starvation, conventional bombing and banzai charges?

Would you be able to tell the families of the U.S. dead after the invasions "we
had a bomb that could have saved your boy's life but felt it was immoral to use
it?"

Put yourself in 1945. War had been going on for a decade. Tens of millions of
people had already died. The world was already exhausted from the war. Knowing
what you would have known then, not what you know now, I would hope you'd try
anything to bring the agony to a close.

Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired